Today in History

Two days of anti-government riots in Port-au-Prince result in 14 dead.

South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu declares martial law.

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and 770 others are arrested in protest against voter discrimination in Alabama.

President Lyndon B. Johnson rejects Charles de Gaulle‘s plan for a neutral Vietnam.

Four black students stage a sit-in at a segregated Greensboro, N.C. lunch counter.

Three A-bomb tests are completed in the desert of Nevada.

U.S. Rangers and Filipino guerrillas rescue 513 American survivors of the Bataan Death March.

U.S. Army troops invade two Kwajalein Islands in the Pacific.

American tanks and infantry are battered at German positions at Faid Pass in North Africa.

Planes of the U.S. Pacific fleet attack Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.

Boris Yeltsin, The first president of the Republic of Russia and prime minister of the Russian Federation.

A Loening Air Yacht of Air Ferries makes its first passenger run between San Francisco and Oakland, California..

U.S. troops leave Cuba after installing Jose Miguel Gomez as president.

Germany contests French rule in Morocco.

Langston Hughes, African-American poet

Clark Gable, American film actor (Mutiny on the Bounty, Gone With the Wind).

Hattie Caraway, first woman elected to the U.S. Senate.

A furious Governor Sam Houston storms out of a legislative session upon learning that Texas has voted 167-7 to secede from the Union.

France declares war on Britain and the Netherlands.

The tobacco laws of Virginia are codified, limiting tobacco production to reduce dependence on a single-crop economy.

Elizabeth I, Queen of England, signs the Warrant of Execution for Mary Queen of Scots.

Sir Edward Coke, English jurist who helped the development of English law with his arguments for the supremacy of common law over royal prerogative.

Edward III is coronated King of England.